Lt Dennis who commanded HMS VALOROUS, one of two British destroyers sent to Kristiansand in May 1945 to accept the surrender of German naval forces, provided details of the U-boats at Marvika which formally surrendered on the 15 May aboard my father's ship, HMS VENOMOUS.

I shall be quoting from his unpublished memoir which I consulted in the Library of the Imperial War Museum in London in the forthcoming book on HMS VENOMOUS:-

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That day the surrender of the U-boat flotilla took place aboard HMS Venomous as described by Prideaux:

On the 15th May German Officers came on-board Venomous – they had to row their own boat – to sign over the necessary handover documents. Present on board on the occasion were the Allied Naval Area Commander, Captain Lord Teynham, and the Norwegian Navy District Commander, Commodore Landgraff, who actually followed Venomous from England”.

William Collister wrote that “they accepted the surrender of forty or more subs some of them brand new super subs all ready for action”. Dennis, who visited their base at Marvika, was more precise:

“There were 26 in all. I still have some numbers: U 281, 299, 369, 712, 1163 (TypeVIIC): U 2321, 2325, 2334, 2335, 2337, 2350, 2353, 2354, 2361, 2363 (Type XXIII): and U 2529 (Type XXI). The Type XXIII and XXI were the very latest, streamlined and very fast underwater. We were indeed lucky that they had hardly been in service long enough to affect the war at sea.
I walked around some of them and was tremendously impressed with their equipment, their cleanliness and the high morale of the officers and men. This was indeed remarkable considering the appalling losses they had suffered (something like four out of five of all U-boat men).

Dennis described how a few days later they played:

“a rather dirty trick on them” when “the German crews were got up on deck without warning. They were not allowed down again, and the boats in due course went off to the UK with no danger of being scuttled or destroyed (c.f. Scapa Flow in 1919). In fact one went to the Norwegians, the Americans and the British and the rest were eventually sank in deep water off the Hebrides.”

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Lt Cdr Dennis died two weeks ago and his obituary in the TELEGRAPH can be seen at: [www.telegraph.co.uk]

Bill Forster
son of
William Redvers Forster (1900-75)